Clan Murphy (and Idylls Press) will be off-the-grid now until January 3, but before I sign off, I wanted to share something old and something new.
The “something old” is G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful little poem, A Christmas Carol:
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all [...]

John Romanowsky has a terrific GodSpy interview with John Allen, whose just published a book on Opus Dei. Among Allen’s many wonderful comments was the following, to which I would happily say, Amen:
When you look around at the Catholic scene, you see that you’ve got your traditionalist-liturgical Catholics, your social justice Catholics, your charismatic Catholics, [...]

…this summer, when the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture, Exeter College (Oxford), and our friends at Second Spring host a series of workshop/conferences on three subjects close to our hearts here at Idylls Press: The Theology of the Body, "Shakespeare’s Secret", and "Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration."
The conference on Shakespeare, by [...]

My aunt sent me the link to this fun linguistic test. I ended up scoring a 46% "Barely Yankee". I suspect the "barely" comes from the fact that though I was raised in Central Illinois, and picked up a lot of Great Lakes-isms, my parents and most of my relatives were originally Kentucky farm [...]

This has been a busy season for movies we want to see, has it not? Rachel and I finally saw Narnia yesterday, along with members of our mythopoeic book group, then we all came back to our place to chat about it.
Of the eight of us who saw it, I suspect I liked the [...]